--
Impersonations
of Martha Graham, says Henrietta Bannerman, remind us of the comic aspects
of Graham and her work.

by
Henrietta Bannerman

Richard Move's impersonation
of Martha Graham in Martha@Dance Umbrella, seen at the end of
1999 at the Brick Lane Music Hall in London, reveals an essential truth.
If you invest yourself with an unassailable god-like status, as Graham
did, you leave yourself open to mockery. Be it ever so gentle and tongue-in­cheek
as Move's show is -- there is still the danger that you will be ridiculed.
Graham constructed herself as a goddess of modem dance and of culture,
even to the extent that she had to be reminded by her close friend, the
Jungian analyst Frances Wickes, 'Martha, you are not a goddess. You are
human. You are not immortal'. (1) But the aura and
atmosphere of serious art that Graham created around herself and
her dancers was palpable -- she was, on stage and in private life, the
High Priestess of modern dance and, throughout the years, her sense of
high art has provided a rich field for parody and caricature. Entertainers
from Fanny Brice in the 1930s to Move in the 1990s have taken off Martha
Graham.

Yet there is another truth in there
too. Graham's impersonators, including Charles Weidman in the 1940s, Danny
Kaye in the 1950s and British music hall comedian Cyril Richard (Graham's
favourite), (2) responded to a comic sense that
is intrinsic in Graham and her dances. Undeniably Graham took herself
seriously, she could not have built an entire technique or achieved her
place in modern dance history if she had not. Louis Horst's 'Mirthless
Martha' suffered earth shattering and ferocious bouts of temper and 'black
Irish moods'. (3) But she had a funny side too.
Agnes de Mille recalls that Graham could be 'impudent, sly, merry, her
wicked humour flickering-dusting'. (4) That Graham
had a sense of humour about herself as a performer is revealed in an incident
related in her autobiography Blood Memory. When she had to be
replaced at short notice as Jocasta in Night Journey (1947),
she was asked, 'Martha did you die by the bed?' Graham, who was renowned
for insisting that her place was centre stage, replied, 'Die upstage?
Never!' (5)

Even though Graham is known best
for her canon of sombre, stark and psychological dances, she did make
several works throughout her career that are light in tone and others
that are funny. The comic dances in Graham's repertory include Acrobats
of God (1960) which jokingly portrays the trials and tribulations
of the dancer's way of life and Maple Leaf Rag (1990),
the last complete dance that Graham created.

The development of Graham's comic
and satiric dances started early in her career, at a time when she was
creating and constantly changing her vocabulary. In Four Sincerities
of 1929, for example, she first wore shores -- a pair of 'giddy high-heeled
slippers' to help convey the vain and silly aspects of the personality
she portrayed. (6)

Graham's movement system at this
time was designed primarily to express suffering, despair or protest and
featured the 'taut strong torso with its deep contractions and spasmodic
breath releases'. (7) Twists in the upper body,
walks that carried the dancer dramatically and purposefully through space,
hips and elbows thrust in counterpoint to one another, or to the knee,
typified Graham's austere vocabulary. Her dances communicated a sense
of rebellion and she questioned traditions associated with dance as well
as those allied to political or social issues. Going against the grain,
she remarked that 'ugliness may actually be beautiful if it cries out
with the voice of power'. (8) But, writes dance
historian Jack Anderson, the voice of power was too strident for one of
Graham's dear friends who reacted to these early dances with the exclamation,
'It's dreadful Martha, how long do you expect to keep this up?' Graham
replied, 'As long as I have an audience.' (9)

Another of Graham's witty, humorous
works was a suite of solo dances, called Dance Songs included
one subtitled Satyric
Festival Song, created in 1932. In a sheath dress of broad black
and green bands, the dancer scuttles and skitters around the stage stopping
now and then in an exaggerated pose. The thrust of a hip or knee is comically
accentuated by the stretchy material of the costume which both confines
and accentuates the dancer's movements. She throws mischievous challenging
looks at the audience and scampers this way and that. Arms held tightly
at the side of a stiffly held torso, she teeters forwards, suddenly changes
her mind and moves just as fast backwards.

Stodelle who saw Graham's performances
of Satyric Festival Song recounts that when she performed 'impish
capers and off-balance nms' or tossed her hair about with jerky motions
of her head, the audience responded with 'gales of laughter'. (10)

In 1932 Graham would not have used
much facial gesture in her performance. Critic and historian Walter Terry
(11) tells us that the solo Frontier (1935)
was one of the first dances in which Graham's face lost its impassivity
and expressed emotion. The contortions and gyrations of her body against
a deadpan face in Satyric Festival Song would have added an ironic
effect to the solo. Dancers today allow their facial expression to reflect
the comic antics of the body
but over the years Graham probably changed her mind about the way she
wanted to see the solo performed. The Japanese-American dancer Yuriko
remarked that Graham flowed with the time, she never resisted change.
When she saw new bodies coming into the studio, she changed the technique.
(12)

Satyric Festival Song was
an early indication that Graham could make people laugh. In the six-minute
solo Frontier of 1935, she moved effortlessly between sobriety
and humour. A precursor of Appalachian Spring (1944), Frontier
is a joyous dance with a sense of vibrancy and frolic. The young
pioneer woman is thrilled by the challenge of the land and her ownership
of it and there is comedy in the changes between her expression of awe-struck
wonder and the carefree way in which she kicks up her heels, leaping forwards
and backwards in front of the fence that represents her homestead.

If the solos Satyric Festival
Song and Frontier hinted at wit and humour, then the company
work Every Soul is a Circus of 1939 is clear
evidence that Graham could make an entire comic dance and that she herself
was able to sustain a comic role.

By 1939, Graham had considerably
expanded her theatrical approach and resources. In 1938, the ballet-trained
Erick Hawkins joined the erstwhile all-female group and in American
Document of 1938 Graham had begun to explore the rich choreographic
field of human relationships. The partnership extended beyond dance when
Hawkins became Graham's lover and Every Song is a Circus reveals
something of their real life feelings for one another. In this Graham
'staged a circus of her own with tricks and props a-plenty'. (13)
As the Empress of the Arena, Graham was a 'dizzy woman, flirting and playing
parts'. (14) She was saved from herself by the dominating
and pompous Ringmaster. Even so, 'she indulged in flirtations of the frothiest
kind with an Acrobat, whose aerial antics swept her off her feet', (15)
But, in amongst the fun and frolic was a tragic note. Graham portrayed
the Empress as a woman aware of the banality of her life and with a sense
that she was lost and alone. Graham's comic art arose from her special
ability to veer between the humorous and the tragic, to be laughing, joking
and flirting one moment and then to collapse in despair the next; it was
this switch in emotional states that made her such a consummate comedienne.

An extract from Every Soul
is a Circus (16) that I was able to
see in New York revealed Graham as a true coquette. Wearing a glamorous
white chiffon dress, she reclines flirtatiously on a sofa or executes
her signature high split kick. The leg slicing up sideways past the ear
in the context of the dance communicates playfulness and high spirits.

Terry compared Graham's brand of
humour in Every Soul is a Circus to performances
by the comedy actress Beatrice Lillie. (17) Lillie
won an intemational reputation for her work in revues, television and
films and of particular note to British audiences was her role as Mame
during the late 1950s in the play Auntie Mame. Like Graham, Bea
Lillie was small, dark-haired and elegant and she was well-known for her
sophisticated, ironic wit. Helpern suggests that Graham's skill as a comedienne
resulted from her sense of timing, as well as her use of dynamics. It
is, remarks Helpern, the 'pauses between gestures and glances, the small
sudden movements' that were marked aspects of Graham's interpretation
of the Empress in Every Soul is a Circus. (18)

Every Soul is a
Circus has retained its sense of comedy for later audiences. The
critic Camille Hardy described a 1980s revival of the dance as 'wickedly
funny and self-mocking'. (19) In this and in Punch
and Judy (1941), Graham's sense of comedy was, said one critic of
the time, almost Chaplinesque. (20) Terry recounts
that Punch and Judy dealt with 'the squabble and scuffle of married
life'. He remarks that Graham handled the theme with 'devastating truthfulness
and roaring humour' and praises her performance of a wife who is driven
into a 'romantic dreamworld' by 'her irritating husband'. This escape
into flights of fancy does not stop her indulging, however, 'in multiple
and hilarious flirtings with a soldier, a scout and a highwayman'. She
is, says Terry, getting her own back on her husband for 'his amorous digression
with one called Pretty Polly'. (21)

In 1944, Graham made what is considered
to be one of her greatest
works. Appalachian Spring concerns a newly married Quaker couple
at the turn of the century who are settling into their homestead and it
expresses an entire range of human emotions. Who cannot fail to smile
at the zealous behaviour of the Revivalist preacher? Dressed in a tight-fitting
frock coat, his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat, he is both comic
and sinister. Here is a pompous man of religion who Graham described as
'ninety-nine percent sex and one percent religion’. (22)
Throwing himself to his knees and in expansive and emphatic arm geshues,
he preaches fervently about life, love and God whilst his four female
followers scamper skittishly around him. Somehow the devout sense of religious
ecstasy and evangelical worship becomes transformed into an interplay
that suggests sexual attraction as much as it demonstrates religious zeal.

In Appalachian Spring, Graham
draws humour from the character of the Preacher when, for example, crouching
low to the ground and with his torso inclining backwards, he minces forwards
supported by his young acolytes. The Preacher's zigzag body design makes
a striking and comic counterpoint to the four young women shuffling along
at either side of him. Later in the work, about to preach his fire and
brimstone sermon to the newlyweds, the Preacher places his broad-brimmed
hat atop the four girls' upstretched hands. What man of God ever had such
a willing human hatstand?

The role of the Bride in Appalachian
Spring has its comic touches too, especially when, in her first solo,
she flirtatiously marches forwards fluttering her hands at the shoulders
as if showing the audience her happiness and elation.

As a performer, Graham possessed
an innate response to the mood of an audience. If she sensed her public
were attuned to the note of irony in her work, she would play her comic
characters relatively straight. On the other hand, if she felt that the
audience needed a different approach, she could be very spontaneous and
camp the whole thing up. In her role as the choreographer in Acrobats
of God, for example, Graham makes jokes about her personal artistic
struggles. She lets the audience in on the agonies of trying to find a
suitable movement for a dance. (23) She tries her
arms first one way and, pausing to wander around the stage as though looking
for inspiration, she then tries them another way, only to return again
to experiment with an altogether different set of poses. Dressed in a
mauve kaftan, the distraught choreographer remonstrates with the authoritarian
rehearsal director. Again she brings a touch of ironic humour to her actions.
One of the beleaguered dancers is ensnared in the rehearsal director's
whip. Balanced on one hand and foot, the other leg lifted high off the
ground with the rope coiled round it, the dancer is sorely tried to keep
his pose. Graham, ever the sympathetic choreographer, comes to his aid
and removes the constraining rope but, she cannot resist showing her true
colours by giving that lazy dancer's leg a tweak and yanking it up even
higher before he is free to move. (24)

Graham made several other light-hearted
dances throughout her career. There is, for example, the lyrical Oversight
of Angels of 1948 and the more cornic Gospel of Eve (1950).
This dance shows 'a woman trying on improbable hats, vainly trying to
preserve outward appearances'. (25)

In 1978 Graham created her version
of Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat which, although not
in the same league as her earlier comedies, nevertheless provided some
witty choreography, especially for the role of the Pussycat.

Very late in her career, Graham
set a dance based on the idea of Scott Joplin piano rags. Her starting
point was the Maple Leaf Rag, the tune that she asked Louis Horst
to play whenever she sank into one of her black Irish depressions. Maple
Leaf Rag is both light­hearted and ironic because it parodies dramatic
movements such as the dart. (26) Mentioned in Graham's
Notebooks (1973), the dart is most often seen in serious works
like Sketches from Chronicle (1936) or Errand into the Maze
(1947). In one of her solos, Ariadne performs this movement as she
strides out with the heel thrust forwards and the leg raised low to the
back, foot flexed. An angled arm, with contracted hand, frames the head
and the whole upper body is twisted against the forward surging legs.

The dart movement is a powerful
body design suggesting anguish and inner turmoil. Viewed in the context
of the light-hearted Maple Leaf Rag, it is an ironic reference
to the dark side of Graham's personality and choreography. There are other
more obviously funny moments in this work, too, particularly when the
dancers flirt with each other while balancing precariously on the wooden
plank or joggling board which is used by courting couples in the American
South.

As the High Priestess of modern
dance, Graham created a repertory of serious dramatic dances that mine
deep into human psychology and emotions, but to overlook her capacity
for humour and satire would be to miss a vital part of her searching exploration
of human behaviour. Graham's imitators and impersonators highlight her
particular brand of high-art modern dance, but they serve too as an illumination
of Graham's other -- her sense of fun and vitality and her ability to
laugh at the world and at herself.

Henrietta Bannerman, lecturer
supervisor at Laban Centre London, studied Graham technique in New York
in 1964 with members of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and later at
the London School of Contemporary Dance under Robert Cohan. In 1998 she
gained a PhD for her thesis on movement and meaning in the works of Martha
Graham and has since given papers at the New Scholars Conference at Middlesex
University and at the Martha Graham Study Day at the Barbican Centre.

1 De Mille, Agnes. Martha.
The Life and Work of Martha Graham. A Biography.
London : Hutchinson, 1992; 232.

23 These arm movements parody those
that were created from Graham's role as Clytemnestra in Clytemnestra
(1958). There are other idiosyncratic arm movements in Graham's role in
Acrobats which refer to her role as Phaedra (1964). Personal
communication with Mr Ron Protas, 1999.